EE does not entail UD

Laudan and Leplin (1996) claim that even if we had a general assurance that any theory has an empirically equivalent rival (which we definitely do not), there still remained no reason to suppose that selection among empiri-cally equivalent rivals is underdetermined by evidence. The argument is two-pronged and consists in the following theses:

(1) Hypotheses may be evidentially supported by empirical facts that are not their own empirical consequences, and

(2) Hypotheses may not be confirmed by empirical facts that are their own empirical consequences.

Let us begin with the first one. Laudan and Leplin criticize the claim that evidential support accrues to a statement only via its positive instances Here is how they mean to prove that:

Theoretical hypothesesH₁andH₂are empirically equivalent but concep-tually distinct. H₁, but notH₂, is derivable from a more general theory T, which also entails another hypothesis H. An empirical consequence e ofH is obtained. esupports H and therebyT. Thuseprovides indirect evidential warrant for H₁, of which it is not a consequence, without af-fecting the credentials of H2. Thus one of the two empirically equivalent hypotheses or theories can be evidentially supported to the exclusion of the other by being incorporated into an independently supported, more general theory that does not support the other, although it does not pre-dict all the empirical consequences of the other. The view that assimilates evidence to consequences cannot, on pain of incoherence, accept the intu-itive, uncontroversial principle that evidential support flows “downward”

across the entailment relation. (Laudan and Leplin 1996: 67)

The argument purports to show that in most cases of empirical equivalence we have the means to discriminate between the two hypotheses. Let us call H₁ the hypothesis to be indirectly confirmed, the target hypothesis; H, the general theory entailing T, the bridge theory; and e, the evidence confirming H, the indirect confirmation of H₁. Phrased in these terms, the reasoning is as follows: The bridge theory has both the target hypothesis and H as consequences. H receives a strong confirmatory boost by the fact that e is in place. Given e, the confirmation is transmitted through H to T. That is, e’s truth entails an increase of p(H) which, in turn, entails an increase of p(T). If this increase is large enough, then the probability of the bridge theory p(T) can become greater than the probability initially ascribed to the target hypothesis. But since the target hypothesis is a consequence of the bridge theory, it cannot be that p(T) < p(H1). Therefore, in order to restore probabilistic coherence,p(H1) needs to be raised to at least the level ofp(T).

It follows that the target hypothesis has been indirectly confirmed by a piece of evidence which is irrelevant to H2, H1’s empirically equivalent rival. Put differently, an empirical discrimination between the two empirically equivalent hypothesis has taken place. Accordingly, it is not the case that EE entails SUD, even if the former was taken in its strongest formulation, EE3.

However seducing, this argument is question-begging. As Kukla (1998: 86) remarks, Laudan and Leplin’s misstep consists in assuming that the confir-matory boost given by e goes to the bridge theory. Yet, by EE3, the bridge theory has itself empirically equivalent rivals, which are also confirmed by e.

To opt for T and not for one of its empirical equivalents in the course of an argument against underdetermination is to beg the question of realism, for epistemic antirealism claims that the very option for T is underdetermined.

The argument assumes that antirealism is false while trying to dismiss it. The problem as I see it is not with the reasoning about indirect confirmation, but with the false assumption that EE3 is harmless. We have seen that it is not.

Laudan and Leplin are convinced of having established that evidential re-sults relevant to an hypothesis do not need to be consequences of that hy-pothesis. They believe this is sufficient to undermine the entailment thesis, from empirical equivalence to underdetermination. They display the converse point, that an hypothesis may not be confirmed by a direct consequence, for instructive purposes. They present the following situation of absurd pedagogy:

Suppose a televangelist recommends regular reading of scripture to in-duce puberty in young males. As evidence for his hypothesis (H) that such readings are efficacious, he cites a longitudinal study of 1,000 males in Lynchburg, Virginia, who from the age of seven years were forced to read scripture for nine years. Medical examinations after nine years def-initely established that all subjects were pubescent by age sixteen. The

putatively evidential statements supplied by the examinations are posi-tive instances of H. But no other than a resident of Lynchburg, or the like-minded, is likely to grant that the results support H. (Laudan and Leplin 1996: 68)

The above tale shows how biological evidence of the puberty of the Lynchburg youngsters seems to be logically entailed by a televangelist’s silly hypothesis, which is certainly absurd. It is tacitly assumed that the only reasonable expla-nation for puberty is provided by human physiology. But remember that EE₃ is accepted. The consequence of this acceptance is that as a logical matter of fact,all the empirically equivalents of human physiology are confirmed by the results of the teenagers’ medical examination. Thus, under the assumption of empirical equivalence, physiology is strongly underdetermined. To stick to the physiological theory in this context is simply to take scientific realism for granted.

In particular, the supposition that the results of that study are the only empirical evidence accepted in Lynchburg and that, for dogmatic reasons, no methodological innovation is allowed, makes human physiology and the tele-vangelist’s hypothesisempirically equivalent in Lynchburg. The latter notion is of course a caricature, but one which obviously evokes our previous discussion of ‘total sciences’. The dogmatic limitation to a certain amount of knowl-edge corresponds to the previously mentioned idea of an “end of time” which seems to be required by the notion of a total science. Certainly, healthy sci-ence knows no such limitations. But even so, the acceptance of EE3 proves to be very problematic for Laudan and Leplin’s argument. Further auxiliary as-sumptions allow for new pieces of evidence to be produced, so that physiology is rationally preferred to televangelist’s tale. But even by light of the evidence entailed in conjunction with new auxiliaries, the theory of human physiology has indefinitely many empirically equivalents. If EE₃ is true, the theory will have empirically equivalents under any possible evidence. Thus Laudan and Leplin’s reverse path only indicates that the televangelist’s tale is silly, but supports no positive conclusion as to which explanation is actually true. The counter-intuitiveness of this conclusions points to the fact that the concession to EE3 is excessive, even when made merely for the sake of the argument.

A concluding remark: by repelling Laudan and Leplin’s argument against the entailment EE₃ → SUD, we have not demonstrated that EE₃ → SUD is true. This implication would also take place when both EE₃ and SUD are true. But we have seen that Leplin’s (1997) argument demonstrates that SUD → ¬ EE₃, which forbids that EE₃ and SUD be simultaneously true.

By corroborating these results, we conclude that EE₃ and SUD cannot both be true, though they can both be false. Our independent argumentation has

pointed towards the truth of the latter.

Chapter 6

Social Constructivism

Constructivism is a fashionable term of today’s prolific literature produced in fields as various as sociology, literary criticism, gender studies, legal studies, political science, cultural studies, and several others. Ian Hacking (1999) lists no fewer than sixty alleged cases of socially constructed entities. These include people, objects, states, conditions, events, practices, relations, experiences, substances, concepts, as well as facts, reality, knowledge, and truth – called

‘elevator words’, because they raise the level of discourse, both rhetorically and semantically.) The contexts of construction are no less heterogenous. Hack-ing’s list mentions gender, quarks, illness, Zulu nationalism, Indian forests, the past, emotions, serial homicide, authorship, the self, and many others. Faced with such a dazzling diversity, there is little hope that a comprehensive defini-tion could subsume the meaning ofconstruction in all such contexts. It is in fact a characteristic of constructivist ideology that for any belief, the appropri-ate question iswhy it is held; as Hacking states, “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask what’s the point.” (Hacking 1999: 5).

With respect to scientific practice, constructivism refers to a cluster of approaches that involve empirical studies emphasizing the social nature of scientific practice. Its supporters typically maintain that the social factors be-longing to the micro-structure of scientific practice literally lead to thecreation of facts about the world.

The antirealism engendered by constructivism, both ontological and epis-temic, has been the subject of various philosophical criticisms. One point of dissatisfaction is the lacking rigor – both expository and analytical – that con-structivists frequently display in their case studies. As Arthur Fine phrases it,

when it comes to defending their doctrines, constructivists tend to rely more on polemics rather than on careful argument. Their rhetorical style, moreover, is at once romantic and apocalyptic. They portray themselves

in the vanguard of a new dawn in understanding science, a profound awakening that sweeps away oppressive philosophical categories – truth, reality, rationality, universality. (Fine 1996: 232)

In spite of these ‘sins’ which, unsurprisingly, gather little sympathy from an-alytical philosophers, the question to be raised is whether there is anything consistent and nontrivial that constructivism could tell us, given that very few philosophers would nowadays deny that social factors have a role to play in science. We set out to show that although constructivism, in most of its variants as distinguished below, is either inconsistent or unacceptable, some of its ideas are defensible and ought indeed to be retained by any sophisticated philosophy of science.

6.1 Varieties of social constructivism

Consider an entityX. What does it mean to say thatXis socially constructed?

Before trying to answer this, two sense of “social construction” need to be dis-tinguished. There is, first, a pejorative sense of the notion, in which social and historical circumstances give rise to relationships of dominance are critically unmasked. In this sense, the characteristic of an entityX being constructed is its beingcontingent; in Hacking’s (1999: 6) words, “X need not have existed, or indeed be at all as it is. X is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.” There is a strong emancipatory impetus triggered by this feature: the idea that objects and institutions whose meanings were deemed to be established, as it were, by nature itself, turned out to be merely the product of social circumstances is “wonderfully liberating” (Hacking 1999: 2). To take one example, feminist writers invested much effort into showing that gender and its incumbent social roles are imposed on us in order to serve ideological interests of which most of us may not be aware.¹

A second sense of the concept of ‘social construction’ is a non-pejorative attempt at investigating the mechanisms by social relations are constitutive of certain kinds of entities. In particular, John Searle’s (1995) takes the following constitutive rule formula to be the key to social constructivism: X counts as Y in context C, where X are material entities which acquire a status Y in the socio-cultural context C. For example, “Bills issued by the Bureau of

1More radical than this reformist position is the one of Judith Butler, who asserts that

“the construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender” (1990: 7), to the effect of denying that human sexuality is a biological given. Most extremely, Monique Witting (1992) rejects the whole categorial system relying on the conventional sexual and gender dualism and commends the lesbian as a lucid ‘agent of revolution’ who refuses to be either man or woman.

Engraving and Printing (X) count as money (Y) in the United States (C)”

(1995: 28). The new status, Y, could not exist in the absence of a system of constitutive rules by which functions are imposed through the continued cooperation of the agents in being aware of, and in acceptingY.

Now, there is an obvious tension between the two senses of ‘social con-struction’, and, correspondingly, between Hacking’s and Searle’s approaches.

According to Hacking, Searle’s book is not really about social constructivism (Hacking 1999: 12). It’s commonplace to Hacking that money, for instance, are a social product. Yet, according to Hacking, a precondition for properly arguing that an entityX is socially constructed is that “ In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable.” (1999: 12).

Otherwise, there is no point is talking about social construction.

On the other hand, Searle’s understanding of social constructivism is not related to any emancipatory ambitions. He offers a comprehensive and sys-tematic account of how social reality aggregates as an objective world.

As far as I am concerned, while I am sympathetic with the spirit of Searle’s approach, my motivation is to see in how far can it be the case that entities such as quarks (not only as ideas, but also as objects!), posited by successful scientific theories, are social constructs – i.e. contingent products of intelligent collective action – and not determined by the world. That is why I find it appropriate to take the following mix of Hacking and Searle as clauses inclusive enough to encompass the plurality of schools and types of constructivism:

(1) X is produced by intentional collective human activity.

(2) X is not inevitable, that isX need not have existed, or be as it presently is.

As with Searle, I stress that the kind of intentionality needed for construc-tivism is collective. Intentionality is taken here to mean those features of representations by which they are about something or directed at something.

Further, constructivism is about a publicly accessible world, so that individual intentionality (private beliefs, desires, fantasies, etc.) play no role on the con-structivist scene unless shared by many members of the society.² Nonetheless, unlike Searle, I shall not insist that “collective intentionality is a biologically primitive phenomenon that cannot be eliminated in favor of something else.”

(Searle 1995: 24; my italics). Neither shall I search deeper into the question of whether individual intentionality is fundamental or derived from collective intentionality. Both issues outreach my current interest.

2A discussion could certainly take place about how individual beliefs, desires, and the like can come to be collective.

The two above clauses are not independent. Although (2) does not entail (1), (1) does entail (2): the evitability of X comes from the fact that human agents could have chosen to do something different. In Kukla’s words,

The type of possibility at issue in constructivist claims is the option of free agents to do something other than what they actually did. (Kukla 2000: 3)

Adapted to scientific knowledge, (1) and (2) become, respectively,

(1’) Scientific facts are not given, but are produced by scientists’ choice-making involved in collective theory construction.

(2’) Scientists’ choices are not inevitable.

Obviously, these clauses require detailed qualifications. To this purpose, sev-eral kinds of social construction ought to be identified. According to the philo-sophical assertions they involve, I distinguish, in line with Kukla (2000), among a metaphysical, an epistemic, and asemantic version of social constructivism.

Metaphysical constructivism – henceforth MC – is the thesis according to which the facts about the world we live in are socially constructed.³ It is of course useful to make further, finer-grained distinctions under the label of metaphysical constructivism. I suggest an ordering on two dimensions: a vertical dimension, corresponding to thekind-inclusiveness of the constructed entities, and a horizontal one, corresponding to the scope of the construction.

Let us begin with the vertical dimension. First, it is commonsense that artifacts such as radios, sandwiches, houses and the like are fabricated in a sense which straightforwardly satisfies (1) and (2). That is, the socially con-structed character of artifacts can be taken as literally and obviously true. It is part of the meaning of ‘artifacts’ that they are constructed. Second, the claim that apart from artifacts, ideas such as numbers, values, concepts, theories, etc., are constructed is somewhat bolder, though also typically easy to accept.⁴ Third, the assertion that the referents themselves of ideas are constructed is definitely as strong as to seem unbelievable to many. For example, the claim is not merely that the concept of a ‘quark’ is socially constructed, but also that quarks themselves are socially constructed. The latter is certainly an intriguing thesis, in need of detailed argumentation.

3For expository reasons, ‘social constructivism’ will frequently be abridged to ‘construc-tivism’.

4Platonists find this step objectionable. For example, epistemic values like ‘don’t accept inconsistent theories’ are not deemed to be mere constructions.

On the horizontal dimension, the varieties of metaphysical constructivism align according to the quantifier under which the construction takes place. If one means thatsomefacts about the world are constructed, then one is a mod-erate metaphysical constructivist – henceforth MMC. The idea that some facts are constructed is of course compatible with another realm’s of facts being unconstructed. Further, if one implies thatall facts (not only actual, but also possible) which are ever knowable to us are constructed, then one is astrong metaphysical constructivist– henceforth SMC. Finally, if one asserts that there is no independent unconstructed reality, then one is thereby a radical meta-physical constructivist – henceforth RMC. To claim this is not merely to say that all facts that we can ever know are constructed, but also that absolutely all facts are so, including those that are inaccessible to human knowledge by any possible method. Following Kukla (2000: 25), we call these facts that are inaccessible in principlenoumenal facts. Even assuming that all the facts that we know of, as well does not yet imply that the world in its entirety is con-structed. There may be facts unknowable to us, whose construction cannot be asserted. Yet the radical metaphysical constructivist makes the stronger claim that there are no unconstructed noumenal facts. The ground for such a claim can consist either in some valid argument against the existence of a noumenal realm, or in showing it to be socially constructed. Many would take the latter claim to be incoherent, but not everyone. Kukla (2000: 25) for example, suggests that some idea of the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘uncon-scious’ would fit the bill. He has not developed the idea, and neither shall we, because it will anyway be soon seen that strong metaphysical constructivism – anda fortiori radical metaphysical constructivism – suffers from irredeemable inconsistencies.

Employing these two dimensions, we can pigeonhole different sorts of meta-physical constructivism. However, some of them must be filtered out from the beginning either because they are irrelevant, or incoherent. It is for artifacts a definitional matter that they are constructed, meaning, it is an analytic sentence that artifacts are constructed. As such, prefixing a quantifier would garner no further information: ‘Some artifacts are constructed’ is exactly as true as ‘All known artifacts are constructed’ or as ‘Absolutely all artifacts are constructed.’ In all cases, the truth value is knowna priori.

With respect to ideas, no such limitations are present. One can embrace either of the following doctrines: ‘Some ideas are constructed’, ‘All known

With respect to ideas, no such limitations are present. One can embrace either of the following doctrines: ‘Some ideas are constructed’, ‘All known